Suspected gang members have killed 39 people in two days in Pakistan’s largest city, with many of the victims tortured, shot and stuffed in sacks which were dumped on the streets, officials said today.

A wave of violence killed 33 people in the last 24 hours in Pakistan's largest city, with many of the victims tortured, shot and stuffed in sacks that were dumped on the streets, officials said today.

Pakistan’s opposition parties neared agreement today on their demands for President Pervez Musharraf in return for calling off a boycott of next month’s parliamentary elections.

Police were today holding up to 1,800 opponents of Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf in a ruthless crackdown following his declaration of emergency rule.

Protesters shouted “Shame on You!” as baton-wielding police empowered by Pakistan’s state of emergency violently broke up a rally today and rounded up hundreds of opposition activists nationwide. The government said parliamentary elections could be delayed by up to a year, as it tries to stamp out a growing Islamic militant threat.

A grisly video circulating in Pakistan allegedly shows a child beheading Ghulam Nabi, a Pakistani militant accused of betraying a top Taliban official killed in a December air strike in Afghanistan.

At least 565 women and girls in Pakistan died in so-called honour killings in 2006, the country’s main rights organisation said today, nearly double the number it recorded the year before.

A 12-year-old Scottish girl at the middle of an international custody battle attended a rally in the Pakistani capital today to condemn alleged secret detentions by domestic spy agencies, a day after a court allowed her to temporarily live there with her father.

NAZIR Ahmed appears calm and unrepentant as he recounts how he slit the throats of his three young daughters and their 25-year old stepsister to salvage his family’s “honour” - a crime that shocked Pakistan.

Human rights activists planned to go ahead with a race involving women athletes in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore today, despite a ban by local authorities who say the participation of women in such events is un-Islamic.

A PAKISTANI village council has punished a 20-year-old man for adultery by ordering the betrothal of his two-year-old niece to the husband of the woman with whom he had the alleged affair.

Pakistan’s human rights commission today hailed as a landmark a Supreme Court ruling that a Muslim woman who married for love had been entitled to choose her husband without her parents’ consent.

A PAKISTANI woman who confessed to having an affair was forced to marry her four-year-old son to her lover’s three-year-old daughter as part of punishment imposed by village elders.

Six men were tonight sentenced to death after gang raping a woman to punish her family.